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George Hotz has a knack for showmanship. When I visit him on a cloudy San Francisco day in February, the brash 26-year-old hacker has decked out his basement office with everything he needs to make an impression. On top of a bookshelf, there's a photo of Elon Musk with two darts hanging from his face. On a whiteboard next to Hotz’s hacked-together self-driving Acura ILX is a note that reads:

Build an autonomous car

Short Mobileye

Profit!

Hotz has verbally sparred with Musk in public as he has tried to win a Tesla contract that would sideline Mobileye, the Israeli company that provides a hardware-software package for advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) features in the Model S sedans. His pitch is that he can build self-driving car algorithms faster and better than any carmaker or even . “Google is going to ship by the end of 2020? We’re actually making this stuff work," said Hotz, who's wearing jeans and a black hoodie with a large white comma on the front for his new company, Comma.ai.

Behind his showboating lies a keen desire to build a real company around self-driving cars and, more importantly, artificial intelligence. Since he revealed his ambitions in a Bloomberg Businessweek article published last December, Hotz has attracted plenty of attention. The CEOs of Delphi, a major auto parts supplier, and Nvidia, maker of graphics processing units, have paid visits to his basement office at the "Crypto Castle," a three-story house located in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood and occupied by some of the city’s Bitcoin entrepreneurs. He’s generated enough excitement to score an unannounced seed investment from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz that values Hotz’s tiny, fledgling company at $20 million, according to sources. (Both Hotz and Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.) Now, he's busy trying to turn his ideas and hacks into a business.

Watch an interview with George Hotz and his self-driving car demo:

Hotz began Comma last October and he's well past the lone-hacker-in-the-basement stage. Yunus Saatchi, who has a PhD from the University of Cambridge in artificial intelligence, has joined as chief machine learning officer. Saatchi was a colleague of Hotz’s at Vicarious, a San Francisco-based AI startup with $72 million in financing from investors like Musk and Amazon's Jeff Bezos. Jake Smith, a roommate of Hotz's in the Crypto Castle who is involved in the Bitcoin community, is head of operations. And Elizabeth Stark, another prominent fixture in the Bitcoin startup world, is Comma's legal advisor. (They’re all wearing Comma.ai shirts when I meet them.) Hotz plans to hire around eight people total in the coming three months. He's looking for people in machine learning and consumer hardware.

Hotz is also starting work on what will become the company's first product -- a self-driving kit that car owners will be able to purchase directly from Comma to equip their vehicles with autonomous driving capabilities. He hasn’t come close to working out the details of what this product will ultimately look like, but he said it might be a dash cam that plugs into the on-board diagnostics 2 port, which gives access to the car's internal systems and is found in most cars made after 1996. It will provide cars with ADAS features, like lane-keeping assistance and emergency breaking.

“We believe our killer app is traffic,” Hotz said. “Humans are bad at traffic. We can make something that drives super-humanly smooth through traffic.”

Even with no prototype in sight, he says he’ll release something by the end of the year. Hotz said he won’t be able to turn every car into a semi-autonomous vehicle. At a minimum, the car will have to have anti-locking brakes and power steering. He's hoping Comma's product will work most with the five top-selling cars in the United States. Eventually, the plan is to be a software-provider for car makers and auto suppliers. But car companies move too slow for Hotz's liking. And he's hungry for data.

(Photo credit: Chad McClymonds)

Hotz first began working on self-driving cars when he quit Vicarious in July. After he was introduced to Musk, the two began having conservations about AI, and pretty soon began discussing a deal: If Hotz could build a self-driving system with better capabilities than Mobileye, then Tesla would switch over. But no deal came together, and in Hotz's telling of the falling out, Musk tried to sneak a clause into their contract that would give Musk the right to back out of the deal even if Hotz hit all the milestones. That didn't sit well with Hotz.

"I’m a big fan of Tesla and I’m a big fan of Elon Musk when it really comes down to it," Hotz said. "He’s doing great things. I think that maybe in a year he’ll come around and say, 'Those Comma guys really are good,' and we’ll charge him double."

Following the Businessweek piece, Tesla posted a response as a “correction”: "We think it is extremely unlikely that a single person or even a small company that lacks extensive engineering validation capability will be able to produce an autonomous driving system that can be deployed to production vehicles. It may work as a limited demo on a known stretch of road -- Tesla had such a system two years ago -- but then requires enormous resources to debug over millions of miles of widely differing roads."

Since the kerfuffle, Tesla has continued hiring briskly to build its own team of autonomous vehicle experts, including grabbing up Jim Keller, a chip engineer who led major projects at AMD and Apple.

After Tesla rolled out an autopilot feature last October, it was hit with some bad press when videos went online showing the cars nearly crashing. In one video, the car, running on autopilot, appears to start driving straight towards an oncoming car. The driver quickly puts his hands back on the steering wheel to correct the car. Hotz thinks this occurred because the car’s computer mistook the front of the oncoming car for the back, so it began lining up with the car as if it were behind it. “A human would never make that mistake,” Hotz said after watching the video again. “That’s such a machine mistake. The way our system learns is that it will make mistakes but they’ll be human mistakes.”

George Hotz's Elon Musk dartboard (Photo credit: Chad McClymonds)

To explain why his machine-learning approach might work better, Hotz has a favorite example: how a computer can be taught to recognize a chair. Engineers could build computer vision software that defines a chair with having legs, a flat seat, and a back in a particular orientation. That might work for most chairs, but not for, say, a bar stool. A better approach is to show the computer a million images, half with chairs of all types (including stools), half without. Eventually, the system will be able to determine what makes a chair on its own using machine learning algorithms. "For the driving problem, the machine learning algorithms will think just like humans: we instinctively don’t hit cars," he said.

Hotz admits that his system isn't as good as Mobileye's yet. What he needs now is more data. When I met him in February,Hotz had accumulated some 100 hours of driving data to train his algorithms. It included all the sensor data — from six cameras, radar and a Lidar system — and how it corresponded with driver behavior, for example how a turn signal indicating a lane change would cause a diver to leave an opening for the lane change to occur safely. An hour of driving generates roughly 300 gigabytes worth of data.

On his desk, Hotz has amassed 50 terabytes worth of hard drives packed with driving data. All that data is fed into an Nvidia Digits DevBox containing four of Nvidia’s highest-end GPUs, which are tailor-made to run deep learning algorithms. GPUs, typically used for processing computer games graphics, have caught on in AI for their ability to do what’s called "parallel computing." That visit from Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang also brought with it $30,000 worth of Nvidia GPUs.

In his self-driving Acura, Hotz has also switched to using Nvidia graphic cards. The brains of the car used to be an Intel CPU, a Core i7 processor that sat in the glovebox. Now, an entire PC with Nvidia GPUs sits in the trunk to run the algorithms. “We wanted to test more sophisticated models” as well as process additional sensors, Hotz said. “Six cameras didn’t work on Intel CPU.”

Still, Hotz has impressed techies with the speed at which he developed basic self-driving capabilities. He credits his progress to off-the-shelf components that he’s able to adapt and mold for his own needs. Hotz and Saatchi have made some tweaks to the AI algorithm they’ve adopted. The two left Vicarious because they grew frustrated that the company was more focused on research than on products.

“I got to see all the latest computer vision research," Hotz said. "I would just be sitting there thinking about how do I build this into a product."

In the ever-evolving regulatory environment for self-driving cars, Hotz has had at least one scuffle with government officials. After the Businessweek article came out in December, the California Department of Motor Vehicles sent him a cease-and-desist letter for operating an autonomous vehicle without proper authorization on public roads. Hotz shot back saying his car wasn't operating an autonomous vehicle based on the agency's definition. “The DMV were wrong, we welcome their legal challenge, they don’t understand what we’re doing,” Hotz said.

Because of the cease-and-desist letter, Hotz was unable to take me for a spin in his Acura on the highway with the driving assistance technology turned on. Instead, we went to an empty parking lot in Fremont with the owner’s permission. Not everything worked flawlessly: The car ran straight into a traffic cone in autonomous mode. Hotz explained he's been trying to train the algorithms to run just on cameras and radar, with the Lidar sensor turned off. After he activated the Lidar, the car identified the cone without problems. The car was also able to stop and start with a car in front of it in what was supposed to be simulated traffic conditions. I've seen similar tricks in demos from companies like BMW and Audi. What's impressive and unique is how fast Hotz developed these capabilities.

(Photo credit: Chad McClymonds)

Hotz began tinkering with cars when he was 12 and he hacked a Barbie Jeep by slapping a power windshield wiper motor on the steering wheel and putting a remote relay on the gas pedal. He was able to drive the toy car around with a remote controller. When he was 17, he interned at Google, where he said he helped develop the first prototypes for the camera on the company’s Street View cars.

“Where I really excel is hacking stuff and hardware, but I don’t want to do hardware because hardware is a losing play,” Hotz said. “I want to use my talents in hardware in what is fundamentally a machine learning product company.”

After spending a day with Hotz, it’s easy to get swept up in his grand ambitions. It’s clear he’s got the skills to do much of what he says. But it's less clear what Comma will ultimately look like -- and whether Hotz has the chops, patience or interests in the mundane tasks involved in building a company. For now, he's having a lot of fun playing the startup game. He's a big fan of the HBO comedy series Silicon Valley and is seeing first hand how close to the truth that show gets.

But self-driving cars and fights with Tesla are all secondary to what Hotz is really interested in: artificial intelligence. When Hotz was just a precocious 15 year old, he read “Staring into the Singularity," an essay by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is currently a cofounder and research fellow at nonprofit Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Yudkowsky's essay, written over a period of time in the late 1990s, details the theory that AI will soon rival humans. He posits that with the current development in computing power, processing speeds will reach human levels by 2021, leading to what he calls the "End of History." The essay stuck with Hotz.

“It really resonated with me on a deep level,” Hotz said. “I’ve been alternatively very sad about it, very scared about it, very excited about it, very worried I’m not going to live to see it. All of that stuff. Maybe it’s a religion for me. I believe in its truth. I wasn’t religious growing up. I read the Bible. I didn’t believe in its truth. But I read this stuff and it seems real.”

Hotz initially attracted notoriety in the tech world when he became the first person to jailbreak an iPhone. At the time, he was a scrawny, 17-year-old. Since then, he’s drifted around quite a bit. He interned and worked at Google, SpaceX, Facebook and Vicarious. He recently played around with the idea of finally getting a college degree at Carnegie Mellon University. He says he has no problem finding money, and can easily earn up to $100,000 in a weekend doing security contract work. What really matters to him is helping push AI further.

“Money is boring, but this stuff is fascinating,” Hotz said. “I don’t ever see myself ever getting bored of AI. It’s just the biggest challenge. AI is fundamentally the only thing I’ve ever cared about.”

(Correction: A previous version of this article said that Hotz was sent a cease-and-desist letter from the California DMV for operating a "Level 4" autonomous vehicle. Rather, Hotz was sent a cease-and-desist letter for just operating an autonomous vehicle on public roads.)